Embodied dialog and embodied speech authoring tools for use with an expressive social robot

Abstract

A social robot provides more believable, spontaneous, and understandable expressive communication via embodied communication capabilities by which a robot can express one or more of: paralinguistic audio expressions, sound effects or audio/vocal filters, expressive synthetic speech or pre-recorded speech, body movements and expressive gestures, body postures, lighting effects, aromas, and on-screen content, such as graphics, animations, photos, videos. These are coordinated with produced speech to enhance the expressiveness of the communication and non-verbal communication apart from speech communication.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of priority of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 62 / 422,217, titled “EMBODIED DIALOG AND EMBODIED SPEECH AUTHORING TOOLS FOR USE WITH AN EXPRESSIVE SOCIAL ROBOT,” filed on Nov. 15, 2016, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.BACKGROUND[0002]A number of challenges exist for managing dialog between a social robot and a human. One of these is the difficulty in causing a robot to deliver expressions that convey emotion, tone, or expression in a way that seems authentic, believable and understandable, rather than what is commonly called “robotic.” By contrast, humans often convey speech together with non-language sounds, facial expressions, gestures, movements, and body postures that greatly increase expressiveness and improve the ability of other humans to understand and pay attention. A need exists for methods, devices, and systems that allow a social robot to convey these other e...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010]As noted above, multi-modal expressive effects may include any combination of the above to supplement spoken/semantic/linguistic communication with paralinguistic cues. Coordinating and executing the multiple mediums (expressive spoken and/or paralinguistic outputs) so that the expression appears to be believable, comprehensible, emotive, coherent, socially connecting, and the like may require one or more mechanisms for adapting each medium plus coordinating the activation of each medium. The capabilities, methods and systems de

Problems solved by technology

A number of challenges exist for managing dialog between a social robot and a human.

One of these is the difficulty in causing a robot to deliver expressions that convey emotion, tone, or expression in a way that seems authentic, believable and understandable, rather than what is commonly called “robotic.” By contrast, humans often convey speech together with non-language sounds, facial expressions, gestures, movements, and body postures that greatly increase expressiveness and improve the ability of other humans to understand and pay attention.

Another challenge lies in the difficulty in causing a robot to convey expression that is appropriate for the context of the robot, such as based on the content of a dialog, the emotional state of a human, the state of an activity p

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